The River at the Centre of the World (38 page)

The implications – a cross-pollination of ideas among the region's young, a steady homogenization of cultural icons, the creation of a new, Pan-Asian identity among the millions of viewers – have already proved fascinating, despite being little anticipated by the satellite's owners.’
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They have been hardly recognized in Xichang itself, however: it is one of the few towns where satellite dishes are hard to find, and when I asked a taxi driver what was the main business of the town, she replied simply, ‘Wood.’

Lily and I had a fight on the day we were due to leave Xichang. We had been together for several weeks, the journeying had been trying and we were both tired. But what happened was almost entirely my fault; the way it developed offers an illustration, perhaps, of that most misunderstood sensitivity common to almost all Asian peoples, which we have come to know as ‘face’.

The circumstances were simple enough. Earlier in the day I had discovered that there was a young Scotswoman living on the campus of a small college in the Xichang suburbs; she wasn't in when I called, but I arranged to stop by on my way to the railway station. Lily and I were due to catch a 9 p.m. express to a Yangtze-side steel town called Panzhihua; I supposed that if we left the hotel at eight we could pass by the college, I could deliver my message and the miniature of Johnnie Walker I had as a gift, and then drive on to catch the train. We duly left the hotel in a taxi, and I sat back to enjoy the drive.

But ten minutes later I realized we were going the wrong way – we were heading directly to the station, and not making the expected detour. I asked Lily why and she fell suddenly silent, embarrassed. Then – and here was my big mistake – I yelled at Lily, demanding that she have the taxi turn around and go back to the college. The driver did so, but said there was now not enough time – if we went to see the teacher we would surely miss the train. So I exploded, screeched at Lily and, with a cry of exasperation, ordered the man to turn back around again and head for the station. I would write to the woman and explain later. She, I knew, would be waiting, and would be disappointed. I certainly was: this all could have been so easily avoided.

Lily refused to speak to me. She boarded the train, sobbing. She asked the conductor if she could continue to Kunming, and on being informed that she could, she told a fellow passenger to tell me that I could get off at Panzhihua on my own. She would not come any farther with me, but would fly back to Shanghai. I could continue the rest of the way alone. She had never been treated so badly; all westerners, she said, were crude and ill-tempered bullies; I was the worst she had ever met, and I had no idea about the sensitivity of the situation in which I had placed her.

But mercifully the journey to Panzhihua takes a good five hours, even in an express. They gave me time to explain and cajole and apologize with sufficient fervour that, when the express lurched at last to a halt, she had agreed at least to get down and come into town with me and to consider the situation afresh. We talked late into the night, and, under the influence of several bottles of Tsingtao beer, she explained the problem.

It wasn't that I had been angry, she said – that she could well understand. She had misunderstood, and it was her fault that we hadn't asked the taxi driver to make his detour. She felt bad for the Scottish student, and she realized that both the student and I had been disappointed. But that didn't forgive the crime that I had committed – and that, so far as she saw it, was that I had been angry with her
in front of the taxi driver
. It meant she had lost her dignity, her standing,
her face
; in front of a stranger. I had made her lose face, and that was an unpardonable error.

But, I spluttered – who cares about the driver? She had no idea who he was, nor did he know or care who she was. He was a stranger, and his opinion of her, of us, was of neither value nor interest.

‘That's not the point,’ she retorted. ‘It makes no difference how little I knew him. The fact is, as far as I am concerned I
did
know him. He and I had been talking. He and I had been friendly. He and I had been party to a relationship, and it makes no difference how tenuous it was and how brief it had been.

‘And then you, great clumsy western ass that you are, you shamed me in front of him. You made me look an idiot before him, and it changed his relationship with me. You western people do this kind of thing all the time. You are so damned unsubtle, so totally unaware of how we feel.’

There were tears in her eyes at the end of this speech, but I could see that her rage was spent. I offered more apologies, I agreed I had been an insensitive brute of a
lao wai
, I promised that in future I would try and be more aware of her feelings and those of all the Chinese with whom I dealt. She sniffed, dabbed at her face and then smiled and ordered another beer.

‘OK – all over,’ she grinned. ‘Problem over. Now let's see where the Long Marchers did their stuff.’

A driver named Wang, and his girlfriend, Pu Ping, agreed to drive us to the place where Mao had crossed the Yangtze. They expected it would take us two hours to get there: it took fifteen. The main roads out of the city were straight and lined with the eucalyptus trees the British had imported from Australia; but within ten miles or so we had to turn off towards the river valley, and there were few roads better than cart tracks; we inched our way along the precipices and across huge ranges of hills, slowly and painfully. ‘Ayaaah!’ Wang kept crying, ‘I had thought Mao's memorial would be easy to get to.’

Mao had already commanded his forty-five thousand marchers for five months by the time it became clear he had to cross the Yangtze and move northward from the hills of Yunnan into the vitally important province of Sichuan. He and his senior planners had chosen three places where they might do so – all of them were in these upper reaches, above Yibin. The central place, where Mao and Zhou Enlai would place their headquarters and where most would cross, was to be at the well-known caravan crossing point of Jiaopingdu – the place where the merchants from Yunnan would traditionally bring opium and placer gold and exotic cloths north from Burma and Annam; and where traders from Sichuan would wait in their caravanserai on the left bank, with salt and silver and hides and Tibetan medicines and herbs for their colleagues travelling up from the south.

Jiaopingdu might be difficult to get to today, by car; but the mule trains of old plodded their way there with regularity, and the site where the traders boated their wares across the stream has an antiquity to it as venerable as the great passes and stopping points on the Silk Road, five hundred miles to the north. Quite possibly this is where the ancient Burma Road crossed the river, where the merchants from Prome and Pagan and Mandalay, on their way to the old Chinese capital then known as Changan – now Xian – dealt with this most formidable frontier of rushing water.

The caravanserai was full of waiting traders on the day in late April 1935 when Mao's scouts, coming from the south, first reached the river. Their reconnaissance was to ensure a safe river crossing for the so-called Cadres Regiment, the unit in which the Communists' top leaders were marching, along with their infantry guardians from the famous First and Third Army Groups.

The scouts demanded boats – any boats, in whatever state of repair they could acquire. ‘We are Red Army men,’ they reassured the traders. ‘We are here to kill the landlords and the evil gentry. In ten years we will come back and give land to you.’ Faith or naïvety – or coercion, more probably – impelled the traders to find five rickety boats for them, two on the northern (the Sichuan) side, three on the Yunnan bank. A Nationalist sentry detachment was surprised while playing mah-jongg – its stacked weapons were captured, its members were shot. Another couple of days and the scouts had acquired two more boats, and by early May most of the scouting party was safely installed on the Sichuan bank. The Nationalist troops had been frightened away: they hid, presumably, in the hills across which Lily and I, Mr Wang and Pu Ping were now bumping our uncomfortable way.

Mao and his senior colleagues crossed the river before dawn on Wednesday 1 May. They found a collection of eleven caves hollowed out of the sand cliffs on the Sichuan shore and made these their headquarters for overseeing the river crossing: Mao had his own cave, Zhou Enlai another, and there were separate caves for radio operators, other senior members of the Party and the security guards.

From here they watched as the seven boats shuttled back and forth over the stream. Each crossing, each boat full of soldiers, took three minutes. The horses were frightened and had to be forced to swim alongside. By day the operation was quite easy, so long as there were no KMT air raids – and the river's formidable cliffs acted as a kind of protection, for few bombers dared make it down beside them. By night, huge bonfires were lit on each bank, to guide the boatmen in.

The thirty-six local men who ferried the thirty thousand soldiers from south to north were paid either a Mexican silver dollar or five ounces of opium – it was an axiom of the highest public relations value that the Long March organizers should bend over backwards to be fair to all potentially sympathetic workers they met along the way. No food was stolen; no house was ransacked (other than those belonging to landlords, which were adjudged fair game); no woman was molested; no peasant was insulted. And the ferrymen were paid fair wages.

By all accounts the operation took nine days, and not a single soldier, man or woman,
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was lost. When the boats were finished with, they were released into the furious stream and were swept away and seen to break up on the rocks a hundred yards below, as expected. The soldiers of the KMT bombarded the marchers from the cliffs and hills, as expected; but Mao's men had breached the most important barrier on their long progress north and their morale was hugely boosted as a result. The existence of mere Nationalist gunfire was as nothing compared to the rigours of crossing the greatest river in all of China's vast geography.

Today there is a suspension bridge where the crossing took place. There is no need for a caravanserai, for such traders as make the trip hurry across the river on a steel roadway in about half a minute. The caves are still there on the northern side – dark and dank. In the largest is a hand-scrawled piece of agitprop graffito, the epitaph ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’. The official memorials are on the southern side – a statue of a marcher with a huge paddle raised like a banner, a poem in Mao's memorably wild calligraphy, a museum, which an obliging old man opened for me. I was the first foreigner he had ever seen, he said; and though I doubted him, I could not actually find, on perfunctory inspection, another barbarian name in the visitors' book.

The museum had more on its walls than in its display cases – maps, charts with arrows, blurry photographs in sepia, drawings of the passing heroes and brightly coloured posters were everywhere. Under the glass were just a few broken paddles and lanterns, some straw sandals and a leather sailmaker's device known as a bosun's palm, and which some marcher had evidently used to repair a tent. But most of what the marchers had, they took on with them – filing cabinets, guns, food, paper, swords, chairs, ammunition, books – and little is left but the footprints, the memories and the legends.

A thunderous explosion suddenly shook the building and Lily and I rushed outside. A cloud of grey dust was rising from the bank of the river – iron ore, explained the museum keeper. In fact only the ore trucks on their way to the smelters at Panzhihua use the new bridge – those, and the occasional school buses that come here from Kunming and Chongqing, bringing youngsters to have the heroics of the Long March firmly instilled into their half-formed minds.

On the way back to Panzhihua that evening, Driver Wang made a chance remark that, as it happened, triggered another long and happy cascade of coincidences. ‘A lot of foreigners live near the city,’ he said. ‘They are building a dam. The biggest in China. And I don't mean the Yangtze dam. They are working on something else. You should go see them.’

I did, next morning. The dam site turned out to be on the Yalong – a huge, double-curved concrete dam being erected across a narrow gorge in a river that, in its own way, is quite as impressive as the Upper Yangtze. The Yalong Jiang was the source of all the logs we had seen down near Leibo – the woodsmen of the forests of upper Qinghai province use the river to transport hundreds of thousands of logs each year, a trade so important that the dam's designers have had to build a special spillway for the logs alone, and a tunnel to take them around the dam wall and keep them well away from the turbine blades.

The foreigners who worked on the project – Italians and Germans, Wang had said – lived in a compound of bungalows a mile or so from the site. I hailed the first obvious outsider I spotted going in through the security gates – a smallish man with a bushy chestnut beard – and I asked him if by any chance he spoke English.

‘I'd be a bluidy fool if I didna',’ he replied. ‘Name's Walker, Frank Walker. From Lochcarron. That's Scotland, if you hadnae guessed. Why not come up and have a wee bite to eat?’

And within a lightning flash of a moment I was plucked from the hot, dusty, alien centre of China, where I had been thinking only of Long Marchers and straw sandals and Sichuan peppercorns and whether or not the Public Security Bureau would interfere with that night's sleeping arrangements, and transplanted instead to ice-cold air-conditioning in a room hung with pictures of landscapes of Wester Ross and soccer heroes, at a table covered with red gingham, drinking from a glass of Newcastle Brown Ale, talking to people with names like Irene and Jonathan and Gemma, watching them watch a Ken Dodd comedy special on their television, listening to them making plans for tennis that afternoon and bridge that evening and the fancy-dress party on Saturday night, and in an instant forgetting as readily as if I had been molecularly transported that there was quite another world outside the iron fences through which we had passed just minutes before.